Tomorrow's Engineering Work Force

Using the 20-year longitudinal record of the LSAY, this paper will examine the relative importance of home, school, peer, and other factors in predicting professional employment in engineering. Building on the existing literature, this paper will identify the major factors that have been identified in earlier work as predicting an engineering career and operationalize those factors into variables. A set of tables will be used to describe the basic patterns and relationships and a set of structural equation models will be used to estimate the relative strength of each of the major factors associated with successful entry into an engineering career. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the implications of these results for engineering education.